Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  Jean’s habit was to wake early and take a cold bath at seven every morning. She had become very sensitive to the nuances of her disease and approached the prospect of bathing with great caution. On one occasion, she described what happened when she began to feel the onset of a seizure: “I began to be absent-minded as soon as I started to take my bath, so I hurried with it & after partially dressing, I lay down on my bed.”

  On the morning of Christmas Eve, after an early ride to West Redding to collect the mail, Jean went for her customary bath. When she did not appear afterward, Katy Leary went looking for her. To her utter horror, she found Jean lying motionless in the water. After Katy removed Jean from the bathtub and failed to revive her, she ran to roust Twain from his bed, and the two rushed to the bathroom. Twain stood still, gazing at his dead daughter lying on the bathroom floor, and finally said to Katy: “She’s happy now, she’s with her mother and sister; and if I thought I could bring her back by just saying one word, I wouldn’t say it.” Eight months after moving to Redding, Jean was dead.

  In an account published in the New York American on Christmas Day, the examining physician of the county attributed Jean’s death to drowning. This initial diagnosis was incorrect; after an autopsy found an absence of water in the lungs, the cause of death was believed to be sudden heart failure. Jean died seven months shy of her thirtieth birthday. Two days later, Twain expressed his utter relief to Mai Rogers over his daughter’s demise.

  I am already rejoicing that she has been set free. It is always so with me. My grief for the loss of a friend is soon replaced by gratitude that the friend is released from the ungentle captivity of this life. For sixteen years Jean suffered unspeakably, under the dominion of her cruel malady, & we were always dreading that some frightful accident would happen to her that would stretch her mutilated upon her bed for the rest of her life—or, worse—that her mind would become affected; but now she is free, & harm can never come to her more.

  Writing to Mrs. Whitmore on December 28, Twain managed to combine his sorrow over Jean’s death with a condemnation of Isabel’s character.

  She is out of it all, dear Mrs. Whitmore—the first kindness that has come to her from the Source of All Kindness in sixteen years. She & I had a long & loving chat the night before the blow fell, & she gave me a commission for you. I said I would write you my side of that matter, & I proceeded to map it out, but she stopped me & asked me not to write in that heated vein—& not to try to write at all, because I would not be able to keep my temper. She told me to ask you to come down here & let me state the case orally. I promised at once. She had been shamefully & criminally abused for three years, through the plots & lies & malignities of that unspeakable person. …

  Twain’s lying to Mrs. Whitmore about not having written an account of “the matter” (his manuscript—all four hundred plus pages of it—had been completed two months earlier) likely was for dramatic effect. The next day Paine and his wife and daughters moved into Stormfield to keep Twain company. The Paines, Twain commented, would “constitute my family henceforth.” With Jean’s passing, Twain could finally admit the severity of her illness and how her death was a welcome release from her hellish existence. In “The Death of Jean,” composed on the morning she died, Twain confessed, as he had reportedly said to Katy on viewing Jean’s body, that even if he had had the power to bring her back to life, he would not have: “If a word would do it I would beg for strength to withhold the word. And I would have the strength; I am sure of it.” Twain told Paine that “The Death of Jean” signaled the end of his autobiography—this was the final chapter. Twain was convinced that Jean’s dying was not ill fortune. Her epilepsy had never been cured, and he had dreaded the thought that she would outlive him. In addition, now that Jean was at last free, so was Twain, from the troubling possibility that she too might become sexual. He would not have to deal with any embarassing affairs as he had been forced to with Clara. He declined to accompany his daughter’s body to her final resting place in Elmira, sending Katy in his stead. Clara sent her regrets and remained in Europe.

  Twain’s health continued to erode, and he departed for a long visit to Bermuda on New Year’s Day 1910, with Claude Beuchotte accompanying him. There, despite the best efforts of his hosts, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Allen and their daughter Helen, to distract him, a brooding Twain continued to ruminate about Isabel Lyon. A cover letter dated January 14 sent to Paine with the manuscript “The Death of Jean” included Twain’s last piece of writing:

  WHO?

  Who loves to steal a while away

  From Sinful joys & foolish play

  And fold her holy hands & pray?

  The Bitch.

  Who loves to watch while others pray,

  And hog their assets, night & day,

  Wherewith to fat her Ashcroft—say?

  The Bitch.

  Twain could neither forgive nor forget Isabel. Paine apparently found this piece of vulgar doggerel so amusing that he could not resist writing an additional stanza:

  Who feeds on bromide and on Scotch

  To keep her nerves at highest notch?

  Who makes of business-books a botch?

  The Bitch.

  While Twain was writing vicious verse about Isabel, she was also reminiscing about him, although her thoughts were far more benign in nature. On January 21, she wrote a note on a piece of paper reflecting on all that had occurred over the previous twelve months:

  A year later—No more association with the King except as a strange white weak ghost. And here I am married to Ralph Ashcroft—& those Conditions which seemed grave are trivial—& the trivial ones then are the real strong things of Today.

  Mark Twain in Oxford regalia

  Two months later Twain, still fulminating about Isabel, expanded upon his depiction of her as a scarlet woman in a personal letter he sent to Clara, signed “Marcus,” in March 1910: “In your guess of a year ago you were unquestionably & unqualifiedly right; the severalties of that guess being that she was a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction & always getting disappointed, poor child.” At long last, father and daughter were in agreement.

  After suffering from repeated attacks of angina in Bermuda, Twain sent for Paine, who sailed at the beginning of April. Clara later professed that she knew nothing of her father’s increasingly serious condition and claimed that she had planned to see him again in the summer (although existing correspondence indicates that she was actually arranging to return with Gabrilowitsch earlier—in March or early April—to try to mediate bickering between Katy and Mrs. Paine as to who was the mistress of Stormfield). Paine arrived in Bermuda equipped with morphine and a hypodermic, which he steadfastly ad ministered for ten days. Twain’s condition continued to worsen, and a telegram was sent to Clara. Twain returned to New York with Claude Beuchotte and Paine on April 14, and all went immediately to Stormfield. After a five-month absence from the United States, Clara and Gabrilowitsch arrived from Europe on April 17.

  In the late afternoon softness of early spring, on April 21, 1910, with his only surviving child by his side, seventy-four-year-old Mark Twain died. And just as he had hoped, Halley’s Comet was once again in the heavens. Did father and daughter have a deathbed rapprochement? Perhaps this detail can provide a revealing glimpse of how things stood between them at the end: despite having had several months to send word from Europe as well as four days spent with him at Stormfield, Clara let her father go to his grave without ever telling him that she was five months pregnant with his only grandchild.

  EPILOGUE

  Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

  —WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  Mark Twain

  Just as he had so carefully planned, Mark Twain’s death was a defining event, and he was mourned worldwide. His New York Times obituary read in part:

  We have called him the greatest
American humorist. We may leave it an open question whether he was not also the greatest American writer of fiction. The creator of Mulberry Sellers and Pudd’nhead Wilson, the inventor of that Southwestern feud in “Huckleberry Finn,” which, with all its wildly imaginative details, is still infused with rare pathos, has certainly an undying vitality. An emotional and quite unconventional sort of man, Clemens was, whose early life was a hard struggle for existence. He obtained his education where he could get it. Presumably his faults were as large as his merits. Intellectually he was of Herculean proportions. His death will be mourned, everywhere, and smiles will break through the tears as remembrance of the man’s rich gift to his era comes to the mourners’ minds. However his work may be judged by impartial and unprejudiced generations his fame is imperishable.

  Twain’s corpse was carefully dressed in one of his white cashmere suits and his snowy white hair was fluffed a final time. On the morning of the day of the public funeral, April 23, the pregnant Clara, dressed entirely in black and heavily veiled, descended the staircase from her second-story suite at Stormfield unaccompanied, and entered the parlor to spend a few final private moments with her father. White horses pulled the carriage carrying Twain’s coffin through the town of Redding (where businesses were closed in honor of their most famous resident) to the station, where a private train car awaited them. Clara, Ossip, and Katy Leary followed, riding in Clara’s parents’ wedding carriage. The small Stormfield delegation also included Dan Beard (the illustrator for many of Twain’s works and his Redding neighbor), Charles Langdon (Twain’s brother-in-law), and Claude Beuchotte. Everyone boarded the train for the trip to New York City.

  After their arrival at Grand Central Terminal shortly before noon, Twain’s body was lifted into a hearse. The funeral cortège traveled to the Brick Presbyterian Church, where the service began promptly at 3:00 p.m. Twain lay in his coffin in front of the altar, with his right hand across his chest, and a wreath of laurel leaves fashioned by Dan Beard resting on top of the coffin. The church was full and nearly fifteen hundred people waited outside straining to hear the service. Two pieces of music were played, Chopin’s “Funeral March” and Grieg’s “Death of Asa.” The service was brief, lasting only twenty minutes. Conducting it were the Reverend Henry Van Dyke and the Reverend Joseph Twichell, who managed to say only a few words before he was overcome by grief. Afterward, for two hours, more than three thousand people filed by the coffin to see Twain a final time and to pay their respects.

  The next day a private train car carried Twain’s body to its final resting place, in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. At 3:30 p.m., the Reverend Samuel Eastman (a last-minute substitute for Twichell, who had suddenly been called home to Hartford the day before due to his wife’s grave illness) conducted a brief service in the parlor of the Langdon family home, where Twain and Olivia had married forty years before. The coffin was opened for a final family viewing, and then sealed, and the cortège departed for the cemetery in the pouring rain. Twain was buried in the family plot with Olivia, Susy, Jean, and Twain and Olivia’s son, Langdon. While all of the other gravestones in the Langdon-Clemens family plot have inscriptions, Clara left her father’s blank.

  The notoriety of Clara’s sexual liaison and the controversy with Isabel followed Twain to his grave. The official obituary issued by the Associated Press on April 29 contained a bullet-pointed chronology that included these two entries for 1909:

  1909 — The humorist and his daughter are involved in a humiliating controversy regarding a farm given to his former secretary, Mrs. Ralph W. Ashcroft, when Mr. Clemens attaches the property on his daughter’s advice.

  1909 — Mrs. Charles E. Wark tries to serve Mrs. Gabrilowitsch, the former Miss Clara Clemens, with papers in an alienation suit.

  This would be the last public mention of the Wark scandal for a century. As the sole heir to the Clemens estate, Clara would devote the remainder of her life to ensuring that these particular episodes in her and her father’s lives were expunged from the official Mark Twain biography.

  After the rain-soaked burial ceremony was concluded, Clara and Ossip returned to a gloomy Stormfield to await the birth of their only child. Rather than being appeased by Isabel’s abrupt firing, Clara appeared to grow more enraged with the passage of time. Over a year after Isabel’s termination, Clara said to Mrs. Whitmore that she had discovered only after the fact that Isabel had been “going about everywhere taking my reputation away from me. I could simply sit and wonder if she wasn’t mad.—That seemed worse to me than all the stealing & without any excuse whatsoever.” Even more outrageously, Clara lied to Mrs. Whitmore, saying that her mother had never cared for Isabel and “in fact used to speak of her as untruthful, insincere & even dishonest,” and that without Clara’s kind intervention, Isabel would have been dismissed by her father after Olivia’s death.

  Clara concluded her character assassination by reassuring Mrs. Whitmore that the Isabel Lyon she had once known no longer existed because “her whole character has been changed by the constant use of drugs & stimulants.” Clara swore that Twain had wanted to put Isabel in prison for her multitudinous crimes, however the “poor man … got where he couldn’t mention her name without having a heart attack & I longed to have him forget it all. The things which have happened in this house since it was built are so terrible that they seem to belong to one long hair-raising nightmare.” Clara delivered the coup de grâce when she blamed Isabel for being “the cause of my father’s death.” After all her bile had been expressed, Clara was careful to assure Mrs. Whit-more in closing that she could “not be thankful enough to the Lord for that solace” her marriage had brought her. Just in case Mrs. Whitmore had not fully received the message that Clara was in marital bliss, she emphasized again that her marriage was the “only happy event that has brought real happiness.”

  A little more than a month later, just before the baby’s arrival, Clara again wrote to Mrs. Whitmore thanking her for a brooch she had sent to “the little creature.” After conveying her gratitude for the lovely gift and expressing how “sad” and “hard” a place Stormfield had become, Clara once again tried to persuade Mrs. Whitmore that her version of the fight was the true one:

  About “Miss Lyon” I can so well understand Hattie’s [Harriet Whitmore’s daughter and Isabel’s close friend] inability to believe this dime novel for even I, who have seen it all, awaken sometimes in the night with the conviction that it must be a dream. And really from the sentimental standpoint merely of friendship the shock was so great to me to learn that such things could happen in the world that for a while it seemed as if nothing much worse had ever happened to me & it was no more surprising than if I had discovered that Jean or Susy was plotting my death.

  Finally, Clara could not resist boasting to Mrs. Whitmore about her latest interaction with Isabel and Ashcroft:

  I must tell you that only ten days or two weeks ago we had what I hope is our last battle with the Ashcrofts. They had stolen some of father’s manuscripts & were offering them to dealers and publishers here in N.Y. which we discovered because the dealers came to us to know if they were genuine. At the same time either Miss Lyon or Mr. Ashcroft sent me a blackmailing letter (which I will tell you about when I see you) apparently thinking that this letter would frighten me into letting them have anything they wanted and thus at least avoid some more of their scandalous talk in the newspapers. But father left me one weapon to use in case they troubled me any more & I used it—He wrote out a full description of their entire story of dishonesty which I was to publish if there was no other way to keep them quiet.—So we sent the lawyer out to Chicago (where they are now), who threatened them with the publication of this M.S. if they did not give back to me all the manuscripts of father’s that they had in their possession & desist from annoying me in any way. It was successful. A paper was signed before a notary & I believe that we may for a time lead a peaceful private life. I hope so! Dear Me! For I have written a long letter & coul
d have waited to tell you these things (But do let poor Hattie remain in ignorance!)

  Actually, the lawyer had been sent to Racine, Wisconsin, where the Ashcrofts had moved, to threaten them into returning the manuscript of “Is Shakespeare Dead?” The Ashcrofts’ “blackmailing letter” has never been found, if indeed one ever existed.

  On August 18, 1910, Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch, Mark Twain’s only grandchild, was born at Stormfield. She would not be told by her mother who her grandfather was until she was in her teens. Katy attended to Clara during her last months of pregnancy, and it was to Katy that the doctor handed the wrapped infant. Katy’s first thought was how very happy such a sight would have made Twain. Clara told Katy a few weeks after the baby’s birth, “I had hoped it would be a boy, Katy, because then it might have been like father.” While Nina was not the sex of Clara’s preference, she was a picture perfect replica of her father, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Unfortunately, this similarity was not to Nina’s advantage. A friend of the family later remarked that it was “sad that [Nina] inherited her father’s cast of countenance, instead of her mother’s,” as Gabrilowitsch was known for having “strongly-marked features and an outsized nose.”

  In October 1910, Clara, Ossip, and the baby left Stormfield and departed for Europe, where they planned to reside permanently. Katy Leary also left Stormfield; on her final day she went alone into Twain’s bedroom and wept for her lost master. The cooking staff was given the pots and pans from the kitchen and the gardeners all the yard tools. Katy moved to New York City, where she ran a boardinghouse; Claude Beuchotte was one of her lodgers.